Memento Mori
by Sally Mn
Summary: People just didn't go to that old house, and people especially didn't go there at night...


**Memento Mori**

It was known - by the few folk who recalled - as the old Phettyplace place, though who the Phettyplace family were even those few folk did not recall. But it had a reputation in both the dustbowl town that the road that ran by the old Phettyplace place came from and the one the same road led to. People just didn't go there, and people especially didn't go there at night.

The seven men who had chosen to shelter there though, they were from a third, more distant dustbowl, simply riding the trail home and even if they had known not to... they had more pressing concerns.

**~oOo~**

"How is Ezra?"

"Well 'nough to bitch about bein' here. Wanted his feather bed an' down pillow, least till someone pointed out bleedin' all over them wouldn't 'zactly make for comfort." Vin gazed around the shabby room, and his eyes narrowed as they rested on at the two pictures, one on each side of the sagging four-poster bed: sepia-and-dirt-hued portraits so faded that all that was left was the faint traces of bodies and faces, thin lines where that might have been folded hands and unsmiling mouths, dark blemishes where eyes might once have stared blindly out.

The rest of the room was threadbare, dirty and simply very ugly in the dim light. The two pictures... were rather more than that.

"Best we get a fire goin'," Vin went on, turning away from them. "S'gonna be a long night."

Larabee scowled. "No firewood."

"Plenty of other wood we c'n use." Vin waved at the ancient dresser and the chairs lining the walls, and at the pictures.

"Got an axe, Tanner?"

"Hell, Chris, after all th'saloon fights we've broken up, who needs an axe?"

A slight flicker of smile was all the answer he got, a smile that widened by the merest sliver as they heard the clatter of boots, the muddle of voices, the dull, rusty screech of the door hinges - and the faint but reassuring waspish sound of a complaining Ezra.

"Kindly tell me again... Mister Jackson, why we are here in this... derelict excuse for a shelter... in the seventh level of Hell?"

"Not Hell." And _that_ was their long-suffering healer, in his best long-suffering voice.

"I stand... corrected." The waspishness deepened. "The Back End of Nowhere... at All... which sounds _so _much more appealing..."

"Ezra?" Chris opened the door and stood aside as his injured and blanket-wrapped seventh was shepherded in, relieved of bloodied jacket and shirt, and guided firmly to the bed.

"Mister... Larabee?"

"Shut up."

Nathan huffed in agreement, but his hand on Ezra's forehead was as gentle as ever. Ezra stared up at him, then at Chris and Vin, with wide glassy eyes... which then tracked across to the picture to the right of his head. He flinched. "What in the... name of _all_ that is unholy... is _that_?"

"Just an old picture, Ezra, ignore it."

"I do not... care for it, Mister Larabee. But then... I cannot say I care... for anything we have been subjected to... today." He shifted, and hissed, as Nathan's hands carefully probed the gash in his shoulder. "Least of... all that, Mister Jackson _do_ you mind -?"

"Cain't say that I do, Ez. Now keep still an' I'll have you settled as quick as I can." Nathan said soothingly. "An' next time -"

"I will... endeavor to sidestep such... lamentable heroics and... leave them to your good selves."

"There's heroics and there's foolhardiness," Josiah rumbled. "At times you have a problem telling them apart, not," his pale, thoughtful gaze flickered around their little circle, "that you are alone in that."

Their little circle all stared at him in blank incomprehension.

"We all tempt fate, the Good Lord and the Grim Reaper too often, brothers," he said mildly.

"And deserve... liquid reward. Mister Jackson, if I could trouble you... for my flask?"

"No whiskey, Ezra."

"But..."

"Once we have the fire goin', I'll make you up a tea t'help for th'night."

"Oh joy..."

"Ezra." Chris bent over him, and spoke carefully. "That is _not_ how you damn well shut up."

Dazed green eyes stared up at him, muddled resentment in their depths, but Ezra finally got the message and lapsed into restive quiet, only his caught breath showing the discomfort as their healer bound the injury.

Vin hunkered down by the old fireplace, arranging bits of already broken wood; the others, by unspoken consent, turned to breaking more. The place was anything but comfortable, but they were used to that, and would make do.

And all of them kept surreptitious eyes on their injured man as they did so.

**~oOo~**

"He'll do," Nathan said finally, and the others all relaxed a little. "Water boilin' yet, Vin?"

"Soon 'nough." No one was going to complain about the godawful catpiss smell of the proposed tea - which they all knew all too well from time soent under Nathan's unsentimental but effective care - but none could say that, in this small, cold room, they were looking forward to it. "He gonna sleep okay?"

"Once you an' me have got it down 'im." Nathan flashed a smirk at their fearless and formidable preacher, Josiah all too often being the one chosen to help him get the foul-tasting drinks down unwilling throats. Josiah lifted an eyebrow, then gave him a silent, toothy grin in acknowledgement.

Chris looked up. "Will he be able to ride in the morning? We can take it slow, but I want up and on the road early."

"Given that he's got to... yeah, guess so." Nathan's scrunched face made it clear he wasn't _happy_ about the idea, but wouldn't flatly forbid it. "Won't do him any favors, mind you, but he c'n rest up in that feather bed of his once we've got him back home."

"I... would appreciate not bein' discussed," Ezra spoke faintly, as irrepressible as ever even now, "as if I could... not even hear..."

"Standish."

"Yes, understood... Mister Larabee... shuttin' up."

Larabee would believe _that_ when he heard, or rather didn't hear, it.

"So how'd you find this place, Vin?" It was Buck who asked, and loudly enough to earn a glare from their healer. Buck cringed - he was never much good in a sickroom, either too loud and heartening, or tiptoeing in a deathbed manner sure to send the injured into a decline - and busied himself searching through old cupboards and shelving for anything they could use for the night.

Vin, crouched by the fire and feeding chair legs to it, didn't look up; the water was about to boil and Nathan was hovering with the dried mixture he used for the medicinal tea he favored and everyone else dreaded. "Only place th'road from Blackwater seems t'lead to short of Razorback, an' didn't seem to me that Ez is up to a visit to Razorback." He stopped to think about it. "Or that th'rest of us are, truth t'tell."

"We'll need to get movin' early in the mornin'," Nathan put in. "The sooner I can get Ezra back to town an' get that shoulder properly seen to, the better."

"True, brother." Josiah trailed in, arms full of blankets and supplies; JD was behind him, with even more. "And thankful as we are to Vin for finding this shelter from the storm -"

"It's a bit -" J D searched for the word.

"Abominably decrepit," the patient on the bed supplied weakly.

Chris sighed. "Ezra, quite bellyaching; we're only stuck here because you had to get in the way of a knife meant for someone you didn't even know."

"But I..."

"No, you don't get no reward for being stupid," Chris said flatly. "Brave, but stupid. Now quieten down, and go to sleep."

"I was about... to protest..." Ezra went on, "at how... you think that a person... of sensibility can sleep... with... _those_ pallid eyesores..."

"Lord above, Ezra, you'll still be yappin' when Saint Peter comes for you."

"Or Mister Scratch," Buck mumbled.

"With... those unearthly monstrosities staring at one," Ezra said doggedly, gazing blurrily at faded, indistinct features on one side of the bed, and then at the dim, cloudy dark stains that might have been empty eyes on the other. "One would almost swear they can see us, and do not approve our night's sojourn in their... hallowed..."

"You don't believe in ghosts now, do you Ezra?" J D stared at him with round eyes.

"Of course not..." Ezra's eyes were closing, and his thin voice was failing. "No enlightened person does."

"Now then, brother Ezra," Josiah rumbled, his heavy face amused in the fitful light, "you surely have heard it said that there are more things in heaven and earth..."

"Said by a... poet, J'siah."

"And all the less credible for that?" Josiah asked mildly. "Most folk I've met in this land and others, and the log-gone I've only met by the words they left behind, do believe in some form of spectral plane of existence surrounding that surrounds and sometimes merges with what we the living might call the 'real' one. I have to ask myself, can they all be wrong?"

"If 'most folk'... couldn't be wrong, Josiah, I'd've had to... seek an honest living years before... meeting you."

A chorus of groans and unwilling laughs met that; Nathan just shook his head, hiding his smile. There really was no answer to that.

"Now lookee here, Ez," Buck had been fossicking in what remain of a kitchen cabinet, and held up one of his finds: a china cup, small and seemingly delicate in his hand. "Real nice little tea set here, just like my Ma used to have, an' just the thing to make Nate's tea more - what's the word I'm lookin' for, Nate? - genteel-like. Y'can even imagine you're drinkin' the real thing, an' not -" He stopped, looking for a tactful word as Nathan glowered at him.

"Catpiss," Vin, not one for tact, it seemed, supplied helpfully as the glower turned on him.

Chris took one of the dirty, dusty cups, and turned it in his hand, studying it curiously. Not high-quality, no, it was just the sort of thing you'd pick up at any general store at a larger town: white china, carefully if not skillfully painted with some kind of blue flowers. There was a tiny chip on the rim, sharp against his finger.

Like Buck, he recalled a similar set that his mother had bought when he was a child, had rarely if ever used but always cared for, carefully washed and dusted, and carefully placed on show. He remembered pink not-quite-roses and worn gilt edges... not valuable, no, but his mother had treasured it, and he wondered briefly what had happened to it. This old, dusty, rather sad blue and white cup had, he felt, been loved in the same way, years ago.

"Wash 'em good if we're gonna use 'em," Nathan said sternly. "Lord alone knows how long they've been sittin' in that cupboard with the dust an' dirt -"

"An' spiders." Buck fished out a web.

"Might improve the taste," Vin mumbled.

"- An' Ezra doesn't need the help to take a fever. Go on... git it good and clean. Tanner, you take care or next time I'm dealin' with you, we'll _see _what they do to the taste, okay? Buck, git."

Buck grabbed two of the cups and obediently 'got' in the direction of the well out back, J D trailing behind him with their metal mugs. Chris watched them go, shaking his head a little in thought as he rubbed at a spot on the cup he held.

Vin met his eyes, quirked an eyebrow, and turned back to the fire and the boiling water.

**~oOo~**

Having coaxed, badgered, cajoled and gently threatened Ezra into drinking a cupful of the foul brew, Nathan took pity on them all and let JD put the kettle and the dregs outside while he waited for his patient drift into some sort of rest and the others waited for their simple meal to heat up.

"Y'all have to admit, Ezra's right." He held up a candle to stare the picture to the left of the bed. "Can't rightly say I care for these any more than he does."

"Downright creepy, they are," Buck agreed. "Not what I'd like to have lookin' at me in bed, not when I can have Miss Maybelle's pretty face -"

"It's an old tintype, I think," Chris said absently. He was staring into the sullen fire, his face in shadow and almost as hard to see as those in the pictures; fingers still ran slowly, thoughtfully, over the chipped tea cup. "Seen 'em before, a cousin had several of them made up as memorials, had them arranged in her room."

Vin frowned. "Memorials?"

"_Memento mori_." Josiah said softly.

Chris looked up. "Yeah."

"What's a... _memento mori_?"

Chris hesitated, and it was J D who spoke first. "Mourning pictures." In the flickering light, he looked younger and more vulnerable than they had seen him for a while. "I know, 'cause I thought about having one made when my Ma..." His breath hitched. "I wanted something to remember her by."

Buck moved a little closer, touched his shoulder. They were all quiet for a minute.

Vin was frowning. "So th'folks in them pictures..."

"They would have been photographed after death, yes," Chris said quietly. "I was visiting once when the traveling photographer came round; Cousin Arley had just lost her second husband. Made quite a big thing of having it done."

"Mother..." The faint voice from the bed turned all gazes. Ezra's eyes were closed, but he had clearly been listening. "Mother carried one... in a locket. Pretty little thing... a young lady, quite life-like till you looked too close. She'd never reveal... who it might be."

"Not even to you?" Buck asked, with a visible effort at his usual bluff cheer.

"Not even to turn... a dollar on the tale, Mister Wilmington. Most... unlike her... I confess, as a child I found it... disquieting."

Nathan grimaced, glancing at the picture again, seeing with his mind's eye stiff limbs, locked mouth, locked, staring, unseeing open eyes in its shadows and lines. "_We_ gotta sleep with them in here, Chris?"

Larabee shrugged. "Cousin Arley did. Always said she slept the better for being watched by her... dear departed beloved."

"Yeah, well we ain't your cousin, and these dear departed ain't anything to do with us."

Vin smiled to himself. He didn't like the pictures - or the idea, much as he understood why folk like J D might want them - but pragmatic as he was, they didn't affect him the way he could see they did Nathan, or Buck... or Ezra, who was half-asleep but still shifting uneasily, as if unwilling to sleep under their half-glimpsed eyes.

"Could use 'em on the fire, Chris," he drawled.

Somewhere else in the house, a door suddenly banged; the candles by the bedside flickered. There was a moment of silence... and Vin grinned.

"Or mebbe stick to wood." He poked at the cooking pot on the fire with his knife. "Grub seems to be near ready, who wants their beans afore _they _boil?"

**~oOo~**

Their meal - such as it was, unromantic beans and biscuits - was eaten by firelight and in the easy quiet of men who knew each other too well for small talk. Even J D, usually restless and chatty, was subdued, leaning against Buck and staring into the flames as he ate. He glanced a couple of times at the bed, where Ezra had finally succumbed to an exhausted sleep; the third time, he caught Chris's eye, and knew the older man was doing the same, subconsciously still watching out for the one who couldn't do it for himself.

They all were. The room was warmer now, and far better than too many places they all had sheltered in their time; it kept the rain off, they'd been able to build a fire, they had their injured safe and as comfortable as possible on the trail, they had hot food, hot coffee, and a roof to keep any rain off while they slept. They had found candles in a couple of drawers, lit them and placed them around to add more flickering light and push the heavy shadows back.

But... the room still felt... off, wrong, somehow strange. The smoky air felt that little bit heavier than outside; the walls, with their ugly, old-fashioned paper, felt that little bit close. The unbroken - as yet - furniture was overlarge, dour and dark with age and neglect. And even the damned poster bed felt - stupid as it sounded - less than friendly. Still better than lying Ezra on the floor, but it was slowly becoming something of a toss-up.

The time-dulled tintypes still stared with fixed smears of darkness for eyes.

"How long d'you think this place has been empty?"

They all looked up at the question; Nathan shrugged and looked sheepish. "Well, y'got to admit it's an odd one. From outside, looks like it hasn't been a home for least fifteen, twenty years, the other rooms - what's left of 'em - they're pretty much rotting away." He looked around. "This room and the kitchen... hell, wasn't even as much dust as you'd think."

Chris shrugged. "Whoever was here probably lived in the two rooms, didn't much care for the rest, let it go." He looked around at the shabby, old-fashioned furnishing. "Lived in the past and in their own mind, maybe, I've seen folks like that."

"Hermits," Josiah offered.

"Loners," Vin agreed.

"Pretty miserable way to live, don't y'think?" J D said tentatively.

"For most folk," Josiah looked down at him. "You, John Daniel, would be bereft without other people, and as for brothers Buck or Ezra..."

"Hell, no," Buck said fervently. "Life without the ladies -? No life a'tall, that'd be."

"And Ez without his marks to cheat and con," Nathan shook his head fondly, watching the sleeping gambler as he spoke, "be like a bird without wings, he would."

"S'not so bad, bein' alone for a piece," Vin said. "Always thought it depends on what sorta company a man is. Iffen he's bad company for himself he'd be bad no matter how many other folk he's with. Same with good." He looked up. "Can't really see our Bucklin as bad company even on his lonesome, can we?"

Buck flushed slightly, giving him a wide, warm smile. "I take that as a right compliment, Vin."

Chris glanced between his oldest friend and his closest, eyes quizzical; as the one who knew Buck best, whatever he thought he kept to himself.

"And as for Ez," Vin glanced back at the bed, "hell, who knows?"

"Amen to _that,_ brother." Josiah raised a mug, and they all followed suit.

"Thing is," Vin went on, "whoever lived here, had their reasons for what they done. Weren't alone all the time, must've had kin they cared for once."

"Why d'you say that?" J D asked.

Vin waved his coffee mug towards the bed.

"Ladies in them old pictures."

"Vin's got a point," Josiah remarked. "Tintypes they may be, but they would have cost a pretty penny, and they've been fading on the walls there a long while."

"Barely anythin' left..." Nathan murmured into his mug.

"Whoever it was, it was a lady," Buck offered, indicating the big, pre-war closet and the old dressing table on its uneven legs. "Dresses in there are... well, I ain't seen the like since I was a bitty boy round my ma's skirts."

"Anything to say who she was?" Chris asked absently.

"Not really. All black, mebbe a widow or mourning for the kinfolk in them pictures. Didn't really think we should poke noses through her life and b'longin's, so I just checked for blankets or anything t'use to keep the cold out."

"Nothin'?"

"Nothin'. Whatever there was t'warm a person's bones, it's right there on that bed."

"And not much good at that." Nathan twitched the threadbare quilt around his patient as Ezra stirred, and mumbled something from his dream about corners, darkness and being watched.

Chris frowned. Handing Vin his mug, he rose and crossed to the bed. "Ezra." He used that flat, my way or no way tone that just occasionally got through to the man. "Settle down and sleep."

Ezra tossed his head, his eyes still closed, and mumbled the words again.

Chris muttered something unfriendly, leaned carefully over the half-sleeping patient and hooked fingers into the picture frame to turn it over. When it stuck - clearly pasted to the wall - he muttered something even unfriendlier, and gestured to the others without turning his head.

"Get me a couple of saddle blankets."

The blankets did make more than adequate covers when thrown over the pictures, and they all relaxed a little, even Ezra, though the candlelight flickered weakly for a moment, and the darkness outside shifted as if with a sudden wind.

Outside, the wind was rising; a fitful moon, scudded over with clouds, could be seen through the window. Chris sat on the edge of the bed, careful not to disturb the man he'd ordered to settle, and looked over the nearby little desk where Nathan had left the teacup with the dregs of his healing tea. There was a small writing desk on it, scratched with markings too old and worn to make out, and a rough wooden bookrack, holding some half a dozen books, all with crumbling leather or marbled covers, they and were older than the furniture by the look of it - hell, older even that _he _was, he'd guess. He thumbed through a couple, looking up as Buck came to join him.

"Any late night spook stories there?"

"Any reason there should be?"

"Y'gotta admit, Larabee," Vin said lazily, "iffen there was ever a night for sittin' round a fire tellin' stories, this is it."

"Tales of the undead," Josiah rolled the words lugubriously. "Revenants, ghosts, specters, eidola, phantasms..."

"Spooks." Buck finished cheerfully.

Chris's lips quirked into a half-grin, and he held up what looked like an old school copy book, with a stained and murkily soiled marbled paper cover. "Ghosts of squirrel stew, pork cake an' buffalo pie, mebbe. Only readable one's a recipe book." He flicked through it. "An' I'd guess eatin' any of these offerin's would kill a man faster than any haunting could -"

Several doors banged - the lights flickered off for a moment as a cold chill of air from the broken window brushed over them all.

"- Though I'm guessin' the poor defenseless critters that went into a dish called 'wet devils' might be excused for hauntin' the house where they were served up."

"May God have mercy on their skillets," Josiah murmured.

Chris turned a few more dirty pages. The handwriting was as faded as anything else in this place, thin and spidery and hard to see properly, let alone read; for some reason, it reminded him of the faded traces of lines in the faces on the tintype pictures.

"Boiled salt pork, friend salt pork, pemmican, raccoo-" He stopped, staring out at a page with two age-darkened smears on it.

Rounded smears that reminded him of the dark patches on those pictures, and for a second seemed to be staring out at him...

And then not. He blinked, and was again looking at a dirt-smeared recipe involving raccoons and way too much lard.

"Larabee?" Vin's soft drawl caught at him, and he looked up, almost dropping the book as he did. "Somethin' wrong?"

"Apart from the cold," Buck joined in, "rain, dirt -"

"Food -" Nathan added.

"'Wretched' - as Ezra would put it - 'accommodations' -" Buck said genially.

"Brother Ezra himself -" That was Josiah.

"Yeah," Chris finished dryly, "what the hell could there be that's wrong? So, boys," he picked up one of the other books, which promptly fell apart in his hand, "you fancy hearin' about," he squinted at the title, "_Altars of Sacrifice: A Tale of Mystery and Misdemeanor_? Or if Nathan can find Ezra's hidden pack of cards, the unmarked ones, we can play poker without been' humiliated by him as usual."

Nathan grinned and held up a pristine pack.

"A plan after my own heart," Josiah rumbled, as they shifted back towards the fire, settling down to the sort of semi-serious game that was never quite as entertaining, but always more relaxed, without Standish and his singularcards - and skills.

On the bed, Ezra shifted in uneasy sleep; in the corners, badly-lit by flickering fire and candle light, the shadows in the corners pooled.

The game carried on for several hours, and if any of them still felt they were being watched, they didn't say so.

**~oOo~**

The earliest hours of the new day were also the darkest, near black except for a blue-grey moon and a few tattered shreds of clouds drifting across it, and the only one who could sleep, and that badly, was the injured Ezra. Despite - or maybe because of - the dubious warmth of the now-just-smoldering fire, the room seemed closer and more oppressive after midnight and so, leaving Nathan to silently fuss over his patient with Josiah's help, the peacekeepers retreated to the rickety porch to wait for the sun to rise.

Van was half-hidden in shadow, leaning cat-loose and still against the doorjamb and staring out at nothing in particular. Lara bee sat on the broken porch steps, flicking through the old copy book; JD sprawled beside him, dark, dreamy eyes half-closed, more subdued than usual in the hours between one day and another.

"Anything' in there but grub we won't want to eat?" Tanner's voice was soft, half-torn away by the cold, ragged breeze.

"Not much." Chris shrugged. "Last pages seem to be used for a diary..." he read slowly. _"Last trip into town today... saw a few folk I knew, saw them look at me, but they didn't talk to me and I didn't talk to them. I didn't talk to no one. _

_"'I did hear some voices in the wind as I left, old, old voices... what they're saying I can't quite tell, I've gotten out of the way of listening these days. My sisters, they stopped talking when they got sick. Long ago. Now I just see what they're saying in their eyes and that's enough. They won't be saying much any more..."_

He turned a few pages.

_"The burying was last night... just me and the screech owls, way back near the old pond. It's best this way. If I took them into town to the old graveyard, I'd need to talk to folks, and it's been so long since I talked to anyone I can't recall the polite words._

_"Least I got the pictures done. Sisters would have wanted that. I think that's what they were saying with their eyes those last days. Real nice, those pictures, their eyes look almost... like they're still in there. _

_"Gets real quiet out here all alone, with just the sounds of whippoorwills and wind, and a wolf howling on the moonless nights..." _

He paused.

_"Sisters are still here, that's what I think. I can't see them, or hear them... but I feel them sometimes. Feel their eyes when I wake in the night."_

He closed the book. "There's more," he said finally, "but I don't think we should be readin' it. Whoever she was, she's gone, and her ghosts with her."

There was a sudden noise from inside, a faint, tinkling crash like china breaking, and a door creaked and slammed again across the sound of Nathan's voice, low and soothing. Chris half-turned his head, but didn't move. Whatever it was, Nathan and Josiah could surely handle it.

"Do _you _believe in ghosts, Chris?" JD asked, glancing up at him.

"Depends."

"On -?"

"What you mean by th'word, I'd be guessin'," Vin said.

For a minute, Larabee's eyes were as dim and blind as those in the faded pictures had been. "Most of us have memories like ghosts, JD. Some good - like your ma always is - some... not so good."

And which _his_ was, the others could only guess.

"_Those _ghosts don't leave you, not really. As for the other sort - the ones in Josiah's stories? - hell, I dunno." Chris shook off the darkness for a minute. "Never seen one, at least. You, Tanner?"

"Seen things I cain't explain, sure enough." Vin spoke up from the shadows. "Ain't we all, some time or 'nother?"

"True, brother," Josiah appeared like a huge black outline in the doorway. "Given everything the Lord has shown me in my life... can't say that I believe in the undead. But I'll admit, I do sometimes fear them."

JD frowned. "That don't make sense."

"Don't have to." Vin's smile was a flash of white in the darkness.

"The Good Lord, he gave us sense and reason," Josiah said, "but left in the fancies and unreasoning fears as well." He shrugged. "Makes for a interesting spell on this earth, after all. I've always thought He had a strange sense of humor."

J D frowned even more, trying to make sense of _that_.

"In the end, it don't matter none. Y'own ghosts, they stay with you," Vin said softly. "An' other folks' ghosts -? Hell, I dunno, but they cain't hurt you if you don't let them."

"Like memories," Buck, for once serious, agreed.

"Good an' bad."

Chris shot a look at each of them, standing back in the shadows.

"But if we are wrong, the Good Lord, he'll let us know in his good time," Josiah mused. "And with that sense of humor, that may be when we find we are just ghosts in other people's memories."

J D shivered.

"Years from now, we will hope." Josiah added, as an afterthought. "Brother Ezra was a mite careless with the departed' belongings just then. Don't think he much cares for the decoration on the china, knocked it clean out of Nathan's hand before he even woke."

"Sure it wasn't the contents?" Chris said dryly.

"Could have been, true," Josiah thought about it. "Pure clean water is _not_ a favorite tipple of Ezra's even at this hour, and that's all it was." He shrugged. "What he was dreaming, in that complicated mind of his, not even God knows, but it was enough to make him restless again.

"Be good to get him home."

They gazed out in silence, watching as the sky beyond the trees take the slow, faintest signs of paling into morning, the edge of dawn on the horizon, and each man thought about his own ghosts, good and bad, loved and feared. For a moment, perhaps, some of them could imagine a tall, spare figure in mourning flickering like a shadow in the darkness of the trees... and see in a mind's eye the faces and fixed, staring eyes that were only now traces left on those fading _memento mori_ pictures in the sad, decrepit room.

The hush was broken by a slow, breathy, tuneless sound - oh right, it was Vin's damn harmonica, and none of them in the mood to tell him to stop, because it felt _right_ here. Painful to the ear as always, but it somehow warmed and eased the odd, unhuman whisper of the wind through broken boards and empty windows.

Chris shook his head. He had lost any fear of death and the dead a long time ago, and to him this was simply a sad, memory-haunted place like too many he'd known in the past. He wanted his men out of this place and back to their little dustbowl town, where the memories _they _were making were good ones, come sunrise.

**~oOo~**

The night wore on, and if there were restless souls in this place - the writer of the book, the women in those pictures, the owner of the cups with the flowers, the family that has once, probably, been happy here - no one saw a thing, of course.

Except for Ezra, perhaps, in his dreams.

Now, in the dim blue-grey of dawn, it was just a rickety old house, a home once, nothing than a tumbledown place that in a few years would pretty much vanish into the scrubby landscape, a few broken bits of domestic life for folk to stumble across and wonder, patches of old-fashioned flowers running wild where a garden had been... and maybe a few memories of folk from the local towns who might wonder sometimes what happened to it.

Vin, saddling up Ezra's temperamental but smooth-gaited chestnut, looked back at the place for a moment. He'd known a hundred all too like it, men like him saw and sheltered at better... and at far worse. Some time on the trail, they'd have to share tales of the places they'd been and seen, the ones that were - what was the word Josiah would use? - _memorable_, and the ones that were fading from mind, but might while away an hour before they did.

He doubted this one would be recalled. J D was, he knew, mildly disappointed that there _hadn't_ been any ghosts or spooks or whatever in the midnight hours, not even much they could mistake for it. He could hear Buck teasing him, in between the work of washing the sad little tea set and putting it back where they'd found it - not because anyone else might use it, Buck just felt it was _right_ to do so.

Nathan was taking down the blankets from the spooky pictures, which - to be honest - in the light of a new day were too faded even to see the thready lines of face, mouth and eyes that has disturbed Ezra's sleep. Just dirty, _almost _but not quite blank spaces in busted frames. Vin could hear him, as patient as ever, soothing his tired, hurting and cantankerous patient and grinned as he counted up the time the lures of feather bed, down pillow, decent cooked food, brewed coffee, all the home comforts their healer could think up snuck into the conversation.

From out the back, he heard Josiah's booming laugh - the man's God only knew what he was laughing at, but the sound blew any last, lingering hints of the darkness from the morning.

Nothin' to see here, they'd be on their way.

Chris joined him; in one loose hand, he held a few broken pieces of blue and white china. "Ezra's not happy," he said dryly. "Seems he don't recall nothing of getting' hurt, getting' here, being spooked by those pictures, talkin' about ghosts or even the horrors of Nate's medicines. Only thing _he _remembers was me tellin' him to shut up." There was mockery in his smile. "Think I'll be tellin' him again more than once before we make it home?"

"Wanna lay odds on how many times?"

The smile turned gentler, more genuine. "Nah... he'd find a way to slither into the bet and con both of us." He looked around. "Wonder who she was... the lady who wrote those words last night. Or of anyone now living remembers any of them."

"Doubt it." Vin shrugged. It was the way things were.

"There was a name in the book. Mary Melia Phettyplace. Written out real nice and copperplate, whole page of it, like someone practicing what Ez likes to call 'proper penmanship'," Chris paused, seeing it in his mind's eye. "or trying to remember it. And little black flowers, much like the ones on Buck's tea set, drawn all round it.

"Mind you," he went on calmly, "the flowers were on the same page as the wet devils and pork cake, too."

"Real pretty-like." Vin said, deadpan. "You takin' the book home? I c'n think of a couple a ladies whose cookin' might be right improved by a squirrel or two in the stew."

Chris stared at him for a moment, then laughed.

**~oOo~**

They set out in the cold, fresh sunshine, one stiff and sore but determinedly vocal, the others surrounding and teasing and shielding him. It was just another day on the road, following an old trail home.

Chris left the copy book lying open on the bookrack before they went.

A breeze, light and cold, ruffled the old pages, flicking them over lightly, and settled. The words, like the pictures, were hardly more than traces, like shadow now - hard to see, impossible to read.

_"Gets real quiet out here all alone..."_

Dust would cover the pages soon enough.

**~the end~**


End file.
